Of Blood and Honor
by soliloquied
Summary: Following the death of her mother, young Charlotte finds that the heirloom left in her possession may not be so ordinary as it once seemed...


Her hands are already cold.

I look up from the knot of ashy knuckles closing weakly around my fingers. Her eyes used to be so warm. I remember, when I was a child, I used to think there was something burning in them. Gentle strands of fire that did not leap or blaze or scorch the world when she looked out from behind their pale mirror, but only made it feel warm inside. Like a familiar hearth on Christmas Eve, snow falling quietly outside.

I will miss them. Already, I miss them, even as they are still open and inviting in front of me – the warmth drawn out of them. I can just trace the colorless blue shade of a chill in their milky surface, more lifeless than the frost-bitten air outside. Already they seem vague and out of touch. Her essence no longer there. She is only a faint reflection of the woman she'd once been.

"I'm not going to make it through the night, Charlotte," she says to me. My chest tightens, a sheer and jarring panic, as her words sink in with the ferocious quickness of a knife.

"Please don't say that, mamá- " I beg her. My eyes are welling up with tears. "It's not too late. Just…hold on. Okay? You can still make it you – you're _strong. _You're so strong. You can get through all this - just like before. Remember? - "

"Stop. You need to listen. It's important that you hear me," she let go of my hand and her own began to tremble without an anchor to hold onto. With one long trembling finger, she gestured to her old vanity – cracked mirror, the polished wood stained red and pink with powdered rouge. My father had bought it as a wedding present, before I was born, and now it was beginning to show its true age. The varnish was stripped bare from long years of continuous use and it seemed naked, every whorl and vein in the wood exposed to the unforgiving air.

"Now…now look in the drawer." She rasps behind me. "Taped into the top. Yes, _that. _Bring it to me."

Dusk is now fast approaching behind the veil of drawn curtains. Her room is the color of spilled ink now that the night has bled in from outside, a silent place where the shadows are low and suffocating like summer storm clouds. I can barely breathe. As I open the drawer, I wonder, somewhere in the back of my head, if it's really the room or the darkness or the blameless shadows that wander here. Or if it's me. Falling apart on the inside, the outside stubbornly clinging to its mask of skin and stone.

The air sticks to my lungs like hot glue. It feels as though I'm inhaling melted plastic.

I run my hands over the rough pitted wood, fingertips searching, groping through the splinters. The coarseness gives way to a smooth glossy surface – a bundle hidden away in the recesses of her lipstick compartment. I rip the tape away and something heavy falls into the cradle of my palm. A soft pale glow emits from the hollow slot, growing ever stronger as I retract my hand. By the time I pull it out and close the drawer, my eyes fixed on the strange beautiful object in my grasp, it's glowing, like its own sky full of stars. A sad, wan light, soft in color, and yet it seemed garish in that heavy gloom. I hold it up to my mother – finding, as the chain unfurls and dangles from my fingers, that it is a necklace. The charm hangs, a dead weight, at the bottom of the cord.

"It's beautiful," I tell her, looking over my shoulder at her from the vanity. "Is this it?"

She nods in reply, saying nothing.

"How come I've…"I pause, running my fingers over the white jewel. "Why is this the first time I've seen it?"

"It's our secret." she replies, her voice hoarse and so quiet. I haven't noticed till now. How muted it's become. It's as though she's speaking from behind glass. Muffled, distant, already so far beyond my reach. The weight of the old sadness pulls at my heart again and I try to push it away, gazing at the necklace – anywhere but her ancient eyes, trying to draw me to her, trying to pull me back to her before she goes.

"What is it?"

"Your heirloom."

"My what?"

"Yes. It's a pretty thing isn't it? I don't know…_how _we found it. Or rather, how it found us. I don't even know what it is. But my own mother gave it to me before she died. And her mother before her." She pauses for breath, closing her eyes. I return to her side while she struggles to regain composure – we're so much alike, mother and I, both fighting so stubbornly against the tyrants of our own emotions. Overpowering us, under the surface, but still we fight. Solid as stone against a storm.

"Mother told me it had its own secret," she said, once she'd caught her breath, and opened her eyes again. They searched mine, looking for approval, for peace - for anything at all. "I tried…years, I tried. To figure it out. Once, I thought…perhaps I was close. Perhaps I'd find out after all. And I could give it to you. But I..._forgot_. After you were born, so much happened. Perhaps you can decode it for me. In my honor. Tell it to your daughter when you…give it to her."

"It's beautiful," I say again, lost for words. It was hard to speak at all, with all the knots in my stomach rising up into my throat for room. A horrible tightness began to burgeon there. My eyes were wet and I tried to wipe the tears away before she could see them – but I never learned, did I? She knows. Every thought in my head, every aching weight in my heart. I can't hide from her…she's a part of me.

"Don't be sad for me, honey," she says to me, stretching out her white arm. "It's not over. We'll meet again. Someday. You'll be old and grey and you'll have so much to tell me. And I, you."

The moonlight, now streaming through wrinkled chinks in the curtains, beamed down on her. She looked thinner beneath its glow, skin drawn tight against the cruel shapes of her bones. I took her hand again, feeling her tremors echo through me. She was beginning to slip away.

My eyes well up with tears again, thick rolling drops that brim and crumble over the curve of my cheek. They leave unmistakable trails in their wake and she knows I'm crying – there's no disguising it now. I try to wipe them away, furious – I never cry. Never. Not _ever. _Not even when my mother is dying, her once bright laughing face – more beautiful in its light than the sun - now nothing more than the bleak mask of a premature corpse. Not even as she grows colder and colder, wrapped tightly away in the quilt I'd bought for her when she first got sick, and I have warmth enough for both of us. Not even knowing I can't share it. Knowing I can't save her from this chilling, lonely death.

And I have to watch as she disintegrates - nothing more than ashes - and I must scatter her to the wind as she goes.

Humiliated and undone, I bury my face in her side. The pads of her fingers brush against my temples and somewhere, deep inside, the last frayed thread of my resolve seems to break. Behind it, a flood rises to the surface. Everything I'd held in for so long, for _too _long, is set loose on an exhausted, grief-stricken body. I hadn't slept in days. I couldn't remember the last thing I ate. It felt like forever since the last time I saw my father's drawn, weary face, the shameless pity blazing in my aunt's teary gaze…she was leaving. We all knew it. Where would they be when at last she was gone? Where would they keep their last goodbyes?

"_Please_ don't go," I whispered into the sheets. "I need you here. I _need _you."

"It's time," she said gently, brushing the wet hair away from my face. "I've waited long enough. It's time."

For the first time in my life, I let go. Let the torrent of shameless weeping leave me, let the budding tide of grief swell and fall. I cried until I could cry no more, until exhaustion overwhelmed the pain of loss and ushered numbness in with it. Throughout the night I slept fitfully, waking here and there to the sounds of her struggle just to breathe. At last, when I woke at dawn, she was stiff and cold –

Gone. Just ashes in the wind.

.

.

.

"Charlotte?"

My father's voice. Vaguely, in the background, I hear the awkward shuffle of footsteps – dull, stifled on the heavy grey carpet. His cologne cuts sharply through the air perfumed with mother's favorite flowers. Musk and lilies. It makes my head throb.

I can't even look at him. Ever since the funeral, since we locked eyes over her lowering casket, I'd been too ashamed to even look at his face. We'd spoken little. No hugs, no words, no reassuring touches on the shoulder (_everything is okay_). It was better this way, to be separate - alone. Hide our grief in deep dark places so that it can't color our memories of her. But now, here he was. Standing at the door. His tie undone. His shirt crumpled and dotted with the tears of relatives and spicy aftershave. Searching for comfort. For the pieces of her that he saw in my over-wrung hands. My cold, ashen face.

"When was the last time you ate anything?"

"I'm not hungry." I mumble, running my hands over the quilt in my lap.

"There's coffee and cold cuts downstairs - "

"I said I'm not hungry."

I can hear the helplessness in his voice. Like a man drowning, lost far out at sea. "Can't we talk about this?"

"There's nothing to talk about," I tell him, looking up and out the window. The rain clouds that had threatened us this morning were now moving on. "My mother is dead. We'll never be the same again. What more is there to say?"

He lingers for but a moment more – clinging to the hope that he'll think of something groundbreaking, life-changing, to say that will bring us together. But the silence between us drags on. The clock ticks, the clouds outside my window migrate west on a hastening gust of wind. He surrenders – throws down his hands at his sides - and moves on, his footsteps receding down the corridor to his own room. The door at the end of the hall slams shut. Finally, I'm alone.

I want to be alone.

.

.

.

The days pass on, quickly, seamlessly, as though my own world hasn't stopped turning. They leave me behind.

I remember counting the hours. Watch how they'd play with the light and turn a cloudless sky into a starry black veil. Hours turned to days. And all of the sudden, without so much as a warning, a week had passed since my mother's funeral. Two since she'd died.

It's my eighth sleepless night. Since then, I'd wait in the gloom with my mother's heirloom in my lap until dawn broke behind the jagged grey skyline. Only then, the spell seemed to lift. Only then could I sleep, and only then could I rest in peace. I'd tried everything. Sleeping pills. Warm milk. Brandy with a splash of honey. Nothing works. I'm left alone with a restless mind and so many hopeless thoughts to sort through. Most of them start with _what if? _What if she were still alive? What if we pushed her through chemo? What if I'd quit school earlier to be with her, would I have had more time with her to spend? Would she have died earlier, knowing I was there to comfort her?

_What if I'd tried harder to convince her to stay?_

Those long nights, where sleep abandoned me and the house was quiet, were the closest to torture I'd ever been.

Tonight, it's much the same. I kick the covers off of me, one sock lost in a sea of quilts and blankets, the other still glued to my foot. I slip into my robe and go straight for the jewelry box. Pick up the necklace. Switch on a light – more for the comfort of light itself than anything – and sit down at my window seat. Try a book. Put it back. Sigh, pick it up again, and throw it across the room when the words begin to blur together like they did before. Bang the back of my head against the wall and wish I could go to sleep. I open my eyes and look out into the city, glancing up at the drifting clouds, snagging on the summits of buildings and skyscrapers as they pass, and then out into the glare of the street lights. It seems peaceful from here. A haven right outside my window.

Something suddenly moves in my pocket. I scowl and reach into wrinkled pouch of fabric, drawing the long chain out and letting it pool into my hand. It's a strange piece. The glow of it so otherworldly, so alien. I wonder if, maybe, it was at one time a hunk of space rock that had separated from its lonely planet long ago. Or a relic, delivered back into the light of day from the crushing depths of the ocean. Perhaps a diver had come across it, thinking it valuable or beautiful, only to be told it was but a worthless trinket. Whatever it was, it now belonged to me, and I had a feeling it was worth more than its gaudy outer shell let on.

I turned it over and over, fingering the smooth edges, tracing some shape I thought I'd seen moving through the tangled strands of color. Many voices, harsh and cruel, resonate throughout the room – but faintly, as if far away. They are deep and thunderous. I could swear I heard it rumbling through the frames of the wall. I close my eyes and try to focus on it.

_Khazâd !_

An image cuts through the dreamy fog. A man, his face drenched in blood and contorted in grief. His eyes – I have never seen such eyes. So much pain held behind the barrier of one body, and it is there in his stern gaze that he holds it all. He cries out, his gloved hand outstretched, as the light catches on the tears that seep down into his beard.

_Khazâd ai-mênu!_

The vision ends abruptly, only to be replaced by a new one. I can feel myself returning to my body, settling down into the roots of it as if afraid I will leave it again. Tears wet my cheeks. A grief that is not my own rages, hotter than a grease fire, in the hollows of my stomach. My heart is torn. I can feel it throbbing, raw and open, as though…_broken. _I clutch my chest and try to catch my breath. The necklace dangles listlessly from the gnarled clasp of my fist.

My ears are still ringing, but around me, I can sense it – the air has changed. A pungent metallic smell wafts through the comforting notes of my lavender candle, though I cannot place it. I hear them again. The whispers. I can't make out what they're saying, but my own voice rises up to meet them in their own strange and foreign language.

_I am ready!_

Darkness looms above me. I can no longer see the city outside my window. The tattered clouds that move on a restless wind. The old chair sighing under the weight of my body, old moth-eaten curtains grazing against my bare arm - it is all gone. I feel as though I'm falling, or floating, down into the clutches of a vast, airless void.

Until I look up and there _are_ stars – new stars, brighter, almost blinding. As though they are still young and vibrant in their youth. I gaze up at them, eyes wide and searching, and find that they are not the stars I know at all. These are strangers in an even stranger sky.

The ground settles under me. Thick tufts of what seems like grass tickle the palms of my hands. Incredulous, I tear a few pieces away from the bunch and let it fall from my hands above my head. It is. _It's grass._

"…Asleep at last," I whisper into the mild breeze. With a sigh, I lean back into the pungent bed of grass. "I'm dreaming. What a beautiful dream…"

* * *

><p>AN: Hi. I'm not a new Tolkien fan (been a fan since I was a kid), but I'm sure I'm not as knowledgeable as some of you here. If you happen to become interested in reading this and ever come across something that doesn't fit or is wrong – please let me know! I'm open to con-crit. THIS IS A REPOST. I had taken it down,tweaked alot of things, and now I'm putting it back up. :)<p>

Disclaimer - I don't own anyone. Everyone but my OC belongs to Tolkien.


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